[COLUMN] Maestro and the Passion of Bradley Cooper | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Around the midpoint of Maestro, conductor and composer Leonard “Lenny” Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) is being interviewed by John Gruen (Josh Hamilton) for a book. Gruen tries to steer the conversation towards Bernstein’s personal life, insisting that the goal of these interviews is to look beyond Bernstein’s body of work. “This is an opportunity for the world to get to know you apart from all that,” Gruen insists. “This book is to understand what you think about in your private moments.”

Bernstein responds with a deflection, talking about his creative anxieties. “I feel like the world is on the verge of collapse,” he admits. “That’s what I feel like. I’m quite serious. Yes. The diminution of creativity, which has come to a grinding halt.  I mean, not scientifically – that has exploded.  But as we sit here, I find it very difficult to think that whether I’m a conductor or a composer of any note, has any bearing on anything. Or that my existence is even worth talking about for this book.”

This is obviously a way for Bernstein to avoid talking about his personal life, including his complicated relationship with his wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) and the fact that he is a closeted gay man who has compartmentalized his private life away from his public persona. It’s an impressive piece of verbal judo, allowing Bernstein to steer the conversation away from topics he’d rather not discuss. It’s far from the only time that Bernstein employs this technique in Maestro.

However, the trick is so effective because there is some truth in it. Bernstein wasn’t just a conductor or composer. He was a media personality. He was a genuine celebrity. He was “music’s public intellectual”, an immediately recognizable figure who used his profile to bring classical music into the mainstream – often directly into people’s homes via the young artform of television. He was a literal “cultural ambassador”, taking the New York Philharmonic to Moscow.

Some critics have argued that co-writer and director Bradley Cooper doesn’t pay enough attention to that aspect of Bernstein’s life and career. However, Cooper is very conscious of Bernstein as a public figure. The film is populated with cameras, stages, and tape recorders, underscoring the extent to which Bernstein was part of the American cultural life. If Maestro avoids the “greatest hits” checklists that one expects from a traditional biopic, it’s because the audience already knows the score.

Maestro is a deeply sad movie. It is the story of a man who felt unable to be himself, who had to compartmentalize so much of who he was, and the toll that this double life took on both himself and his wife. However, Maestro is also a more complicated work. It mourns the passage of figures like Leonard Bernstein, celebrities who could serve as cultural ambassadors for the arts, and who could use media to help bring neglected artforms like classic music into the mainstream.

After all, as many have noted, the American public intellectual is an endangered species. Although they were a feature of public life into the middle of the 20th century, these personalities don’t really exist any longer. There is perhaps a similar anxiety in Oppenheimer, a movie about another figure, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), who was a public intellectual. Oppenheimer biographer Kai Bird argues that the disgrace and humiliation of Oppenheimer was an attack on public intellectuals.

Maestro is a deeply personal work. Bradley Cooper co-wrote, directed, and produced the movie. Although he generously affords co-star Carey Mulligan top billing, he also plays the title role. It is an understatement to describe Maestro as “a Bradley Cooper film.” The same is true of Cooper’s prior film, A Star is Born, which he also co-wrote, directed, produced, and starred in. Given Cooper’s kitchen and food truck experience, it wouldn’t be surprising to discover that he also did the catering.

Cooper exists in a strange space. On the one hand, in the grand history of Hollywood, he is part of the long line of actors-turned-auteurs, movie stars that eventually become full-blown creatives in their own right: Charlie Chaplin, Warren Beatty, Barbra Streisand, Kevin Costner, and countless others. Clint Eastwood is an obvious and huge influence on Cooper; the pair collaborated on both American Sniper and The Mule. There is certainly a long precedent for what Cooper is doing.

However, there’s also a sense that these creatives are a lot rarer than they used to be. Kevin Costner won the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for Dances With Wolves in 1991, but he had to mortgage his property to fund his upcoming two-part western, Horizon. Warren Beatty’s most recent film, Rules Don’t Apply, spent years in postproduction and led to a years-long legal battle with distributor New Regency. Cooper’s only truly comparable contemporary might be Ben Affleck.

Part of this is due to larger shifts. Recently, studios have devalued the work of creatives, as demonstrated by last year’s extended labor strikes. There have also been shifts in the cultures of individual studios. Warner Bros., in particular, once prided itself on long-term relationships with creatives. It worked reliably with directors like Christopher Nolan and Stanley Kubrick. It encouraged actor-directors like Clint Eastwood. Cooper and Affleck started as directors at Warner Bros.

Traditionally, studios and creatives operated under the classic “one for us, one for you” model, where these creatives would alternate between commercial fare and more personal projects. Bradley Cooper could make A Star is Born with Warner Bros., because he had starred in three Hangover movies for the studio. Ben Affleck would play Batman in the company’s massive shared universe, but in return Warner Bros. would let him make Live By Night. There was balance.

However, the industry has changed dramatically in the past few years. Warner Bros. has bounced between owners, becoming increasingly disinterested in nurturing relationships with creatives. In June 2017, it was reported that the studio planned to “avoid auteur directors who want final cut.” It seems like the environment has become increasingly hostile in the years since. Eastwoods’ next film, Juror No. 2, will be his last. Both Affleck and Cooper left Warner Bros. Affleck sold AIR to Amazon, and Cooper made Maestro with Netflix.

These anxieties about the creative process simmer through both films. AIR was produced through Artists Equity, the company co-founded by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon that runs on profit participation for its creatives. As such, it feels appropriate that AIR is essentially a “brand-o-pic” about Michael Jordan (Damian Young) retaining a financial share of the shoe brand built off his image. It is hardly a subtle argument for valuing creative work in a year defined by labor stoppages.

Cooper’s first two films, A Star is Born and Maestro, are deeply personal works. They are both about talented and creative men wrestling with their personal demons while struggling to maintain healthy relationships with their partners, who are also creatives. They both grapple with the idea of art as personal expression. Cooper has spoken about his own issues with drug addiction, a recurring theme in both films. He is navigating his own complicated relationship with his ex-wife, model Irina Shayk.

It is easy to be cynical about how much of himself Cooper pours into both A Star is Born and Maestro. It is perhaps a little self-indulgent that Cooper’s first two films are both about how hard it is to be (and – equally – how hard it is to love) a handsome, charismatic and gifted celebrity. They reflect a discomfort with celebrity evident in Cooper’s press tour for the movies. There are cheap jokes to be made about how Cooper has taken the old dictum “write you know” to its literal extreme.

However, for all that this could be dismissed as ego and perhaps even self-importance, Cooper makes himself compellingly vulnerable through these films. Cooper’s lead performances in both A Star is Born and Maestro involve considerable transformation, as if the actor is trying to hide his movie star good looks behind the bushy beard, fake tan, and gravelly voice in A Star is Born, and underneath a prosthetic nose, old age make-up, and goofy accent in Maestro. However, the works themselves feel very personal.

In A Star is Born and Maestro, Cooper grapples with the precarious balance between a private life and a public persona, and what it means to be an American celebrity. Early in the film, Serge Koussevitzky (Yasen Peyankov) tells Bernstein that he could be “the first great American conductor.” Felicia asks Bernstein, “Is that what you want?” Bernstein replies, simply, “I want a lot of things.” It feels like a statement that resonates with writer, director, producer, actor, and chef Bradley Cooper.

As such, there is a compelling earnestness to Maestro. Cooper may not have the same life experiences as Bernstein, who lived most of his life as a closeted gay man, but he can relate to the conductor and composer’s desire to be more than just one single and solitary thing that conforms to expectations placed upon him. Maestro might skip the conventional biopic beats, but Cooper’s two films are personal in a way that these sorts of major productions are rarely allowed to be these days.

Getting back to that interview with Gruen, there’s something compelling in watching Bernstein grapple with the question of whether his creative work is important or simply self-important, particularly in a world falling apart. As Hollywood seems to collapse around him, as studios become increasingly hostile to these modes of artistic expression and these artists making these works, it’s hard not to imagine Cooper asking the same questions about his own work.